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The opening of the National Do Not Call Registry, a free service of the federal government developed to give consumers a choice about getting telemarketing calls at home, was announced this morning by President George W. Bush, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Timothy J. Muris, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael K. Powell.

Consumers nationwide can register online at DONOTCALL.GOV. Consumers in states west of the Mississippi River (including Louisiana and Minnesota) can register by calling, toll-free, 1-888-382-1222 (TTY 1-866-290-4236). On July 7, phone registration will be open to the entire country.

It dawned on me recently that I’ve only got about 2 weeks before my One Year of PHP at Yahoo! talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland.

Here’s the section title slide for one of the parts of my talk:

I like talks that have lots of graphics, even if they’re a little goofy. I hate it when folks just put slide after slide of text. Those bullet-points communicate a lot of information, but they are really unpleasant to read.

kuro5hin.org: “On Friday, 20th June 2003, the death knell sounds for US patent number 4,558,302. Having benefitted its owner, the Unisys Corporation for 20 years, the contents of the patent are entered into the Public Domain and may be used absolutely freely by anyone.”

Note however that the patent only expires in the USA tomorrow. The popular GD Graphics Library will not include GIF creation capabilities until the patent expires world-wide on July 7th, 2004.

I just finished writing up 4 pages of documentation on how to correctly build shared libraries for FreeBSD using Yahoo!’s Makefile macros. The fact that Makefiles are such a black art probably explains the popularity of alternative build systems.

Using the -soname linker option is good because it guarantess that code built against your library (either an executable or another .so) only gets used with a binary-compatible version of your library. If you make an unversioned library, you’ll probably need to rename it when you add versioning.

Passing the -no-undefined flag to the linker can save you lots of trouble. It’s way better to have your make fail because of an undefined symbol than to end up with errors like this on Apache startup:

Mark lists 10 HTML elements that must be stripped to safely display HTML from an RSS feed. He mentions stripping style attributes from RSS, but fails to mention an even more imporant set of attributes: the JavaScript event attributes.

Sure, you’ll want to leave <img> tags in the RSS feed, but what about those nasty onmouseover="..." attributes?

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 12:19:09 -0700
From: Dennis R...
To: Michael Radwin <michael@...>
Subject: Could you/your family be interested in moving to Seattle
area to do Browser and/or algorithm work for AMAZON?
Hello Michael,
I know this is out of the blue. No, we've never
communicated before, to my knowledge.
Please let me know if you're at all interested.
Thanks,
Dennis R... - Principal Account Manager
425-xxx-xxxx or 800-xxx-xxxx

I told him “Thanks, but no thanks,” since I’m happy with my job right now and we’re going to be in LA for the forseeable future.

He did several things right that recruiters usually get wrong:

He was honest and direct, and admitted that he didn’t know me. Aside from jobs (often with companies you’ve never heard of), headhunters don’t have much to offer. The best they can do is show you courtesy and respect.

He thought about my family. That’s imprortant; I’m not some 22-year-old kid who can just pack up and move to a new city without affecting other people.

He called me Michael, not Mike. Unless you know someone personally (or they say otherwise), I think it’s professional courtesy to address someone by their full name. It’s the closest thing English has to Usted.

So, although I’m not interested in the job, maybe some of my readers are. Drop me a private email and I’ll forward Dennis’ contact info to you.